Month: December 2014

America’s Tortured Conscience

by Will Wilkinson

WaPo Torture

The Washington Post reports:

A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31  percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence. In general, 58  percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”

What to make of this? My guess is that a fair number of those who think torture can be justified are thinking of ticking nuclear time bomb scenarios, and that a lot of those same people believe the CIA when it says that that is precisely the sort of situation they were dealing with. As Rosa Brooks says in a terrific FP column, bullshit:

The ticking bomb scenario is a powerful hypothetical, and it’s one that several former CIA directors really, really hope you’ll keep in mind this week to counterbalance all those not-so-nice revelations contained in the just-released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on CIA interrogations. […] But there’s one major problem with the ticking bomb scenario: It’s entirely irrelevant — morally and legally.

First, in real life you don’t get actual ticking bomb scenarios, with their certainty, simplicity, and urgency. In real life, you get ambiguity and uncertainty. You get conflicting information about the nature, magnitude, and timing of threats, and conflicting information about the identity of planners and perpetrators. Sometimes, you get information that’s just plain wrong: As the SSCI report notes, more than two dozen people tortured by the CIA were detained in error. In some cases, they were victims of simple cases of mistaken identity.

This creates an obvious slippery slope risk: If we think torture is justifiable in the hypothetical I used above, would torture be justifiable if the bomb wasn’t a nuclear bomb? What if it was only powerful enough to kill 100 people, not millions? Ten people? One person? Would torture be justifiable if we thought the person we captured might be about to set off a bomb that might kill 10 people? What if we weren’t sure we had captured the right guy? Would it be okay to torture someone who might be innocent because torture might produce information that might save 100 people? Ten? One?

I think this helps explain what is going on in the American mind. Many of us have already gone down the slope psychologically. It’s sort of like someone asks you whether you’d sleep with a stranger for $1 billion – you know the joke – and you say, “Duh! Of course!” and then you find yourself a couple hours later in a seedy hotel room feeling a bit dehydrated after getting bargained down to $12.50. What’s your attitude toward trading sex for money now? You shrug. You think, What’s the big freaking deal? It’s sort of like that, but mostly not like that at all, because there’s not actually anything wrong with trading sex for money, but you’ve got the idea. In for a pound in for a penny.

The aversion to cognitive dissonance – the need for a sense of internal consistency – is strong. We Americans like to think that we are good people. (“We are awesome!“) Now it seems clear enough that torture is the sort of thing we Americans do. So torture must be not inconsistent with goodness, with exceptional American awesomeness. It must be okay. Is there a moral analogue to cognitive dissonance? Moral dissonance? The shocking percentage of Americans willing to endorse the CIA’s vile interrogation techniques is an index of the portion of the population who suspect but are unable to admit to themselves, who cannot stand the moral dissonance of admitting, that they are complicit in something monstrous.

Our Two Party Family System

by Dish Staff

Former US President George H.W. Bush(2nd

Karen Tumulty tweeted yesterday that, “with exception of 2012, you’d have to be 38 or older to have lived thru an election with no Bush or Clinton running for prez.” Aaron Blake discovers that it’s even worse than that:

[G]oing back a full half-century – i.e. to 1964 – there have been only three elections (midterm or presidential) in which a Bush or a Clinton hasn’t been on the ballot somewhere for something.

Stretching back to George H.W. Bush’s first bid for U.S. Senate in 1964 (he lost), that’s 23 out of 26 elections. The only exceptions are 1972, 2010 and 2012. That most recent two-election drought was broken when George P. Bush – Jeb Bush’s son – ran for Texas land commissioner this year (he won).

Greenwald believes that a Clinton-Bush match-up would illustrate “the virtually complete merger between political and economic power, of the fundamentally oligarchical framework that drives American political life”:

If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative value would be undeniable: somewhat like how the torture report did, it would rub everyone’s noses in exactly those truths they are most eager to avoid acknowledging.

Even Douthat, who isn’t against political dynasties in principle, has misgivings about a Clinton-Bush race:

[T]here really would be something historically unusual about having the same two families alternate in the American presidency for, potentially, twenty-eight out of thirty-six years. The closest analogue would be the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, who served for about twenty out of the 20th century’s first forty-five years, and they were related in a much looser way, rather than being part of the same marriage or nuclear family. In the main, the American presidency has resisted dynastic control, and the dynasts have tended to be among the less-enduring of chief executives: The Adamses were both one-termers, likewise the Harrisons (a one-monther, in William Henry’s case!), and for all their fame the Kennedys only occupied the Oval Office for the three short years of J.F.K.’s not-entirely-brilliant presidency. And they have also tended to be well-spaced: Twenty-five years from Adams to Adams, more than fifty years between the Harrisons, twenty-four between T.R. and F.D.R.

So it’s hard not to look at Bush-Clinton dominance, however shaped by randomness, as distinctive to our era, and therefore probably somehow connected to stratification and elite consolidation and other non-ideal patterns in American life generally. At the very least, it’s striking how many non-pedigreed men — Truman, Ike, Nixon, Carter, Reagan — won the White House during the golden years of the American middle class, compared to the mix of family ties and Ivy League resumes (dynasty woven into meritocracy, as it inevitably is) that has defined the office’s leading aspirants in recent decades.

Update from a reader:

Oh, please. Conflating the Clintons and the Bushes is ignorant and offensive. The Bushes are on their fourth generation of power and their third presidency. The Clintons are a married couple. Hilary did not inherit anything, nor did Bill. A Washington power couple is not a dynasty. Put these two families in the same sentence when Chelsea’s granddaughter is running.

(Photo: Former US President George H.W. Bush greets his former Vice President Dan Quayle as former First Lady Barbara Bush stands by after inaugural ceremonies at the US Capitol on January 20, 2005. Also pictured are Florida Governor Jeb Bush his wife Columba and former President Bill Clinton and his wife Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Talking About The Law Of Rape

by Michelle Dean

At the New Yorker, Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk writes that it’s getting harder to teach the law of rape on campus. She describes a collision course between her desire to teach the hard cases – ones where the parameters of consent may be tested – and the sensitivities of students. Her list of the particulars is sobering:

Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering.

It’s worth saying that I bet some of these organizations and students would quibble with Suk’s description of events. The last sounds particularly apocryphal, I have to say, like it’s gotten misdescribed in the re-telling to better fit a stereotype of campus politics. It’s not just sexual assault stories that tend to get molded to fit an agenda.

It’s harder to object, though, to what Suk describes as a growing fear and apprehensiveness about even broaching the subject of rape:

About a dozen new teachers of criminal law at multiple institutions have told me that they are not including rape law in their courses, arguing that it’s not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students. Even seasoned teachers of criminal law, at law schools across the country, have confided that they are seriously considering dropping rape law and other topics related to sex and gender violence. Both men and women teachers seem frightened of discussion, because they are afraid of injuring others or being injured themselves.

While obviously I haven’t faintest idea of what’s specifically been going on at Harvard or other American law schools, I believe that this fear is real because I’ve felt it too.

For most of this past year I took a break from writing about sexual violence. I have what I’d call both strong and considered beliefs on the subject. I’ve spent time talking to and working with victims as a law student and an attorney. I’ve also done my time as a writer in the varied and raucous (and often misrepresented) trenches of the “feminist blogosphere.” My knowledge of the subject is neither that of an amateur, nor even the surface investment of a pundit.

It’s long been apparent to me that no side of this debate is right.

Unqualifiedly believing victims without trying to substantiate their claims doesn’t serve them well, but unqualifiedly doubting doesn’t work either. Calling the current state of the prosecution of rape as “truth-seeking” is misdescribing the process, no matter what evidentiary reform is out there. If you want to teach the hard cases in rape law, I think you have to grapple with those questions carefully. I don’t think it can be enough to simply dismiss that entire part of the discussion as the product of oversensitivity.

Even long experience could not rescue me in the public discussion about Woody Allen earlier this year, though. It was some kind of rape rubicon for me. I hated having to address it. It felt like no matter what I wrote, it was “wrong.” I actually switched jobs to get away from the subject.

But what had caused me to despair of the state of conversation is largely, though not entirely, the opposite of what Suk describes. Whenever I wrote about sexual violence I ended up accused of advocating dogma, of being a bad journalist, of creating an atmosphere where “truth-telling” was impossible. I was also, frankly, tired of being stereotyped as a “feminist blogger” merely for addressing it. If I wrote that there was even some small modicum of value in people believing victims of trauma, I was accused of foreclosing all further discussion.

In other words, knees can jerk on every side of aisle.

That isn’t to say that I felt no pressure from the opposite side. I have also become uneasy with the fact that these rape stories were traffic bonanzas for the various places I write for. And I cringed watching people try to react to the dismantling of the Rolling Stone story in real time according to the well-worn treads of this debate.

But then I come back again to nuance. It’s not a simple matter of dishonest clickbaiting, from my vantage. Over the years I have watched lots of friends turn themselves inside-out emotionally to recount their own sexual assaults over and over in op-eds. They do so out of an honest hope to be heard in the yelling that happens whenever these stories come up. But they also do so at the encouragement of editors who, though well-intentioned, also know full well that the traffic returns could be enormous. And I have my own theories about how all of that intersects with what happened at Rolling Stone.

But like most things in life, it’s complicated. The resistance to nuance is general. Literally no one seems to want to have a careful conversation about any of this. We’re just reiterating the same old positions. Believe them. Don’t. The courts are just. The courts are unfair. Ironically everyone is too busy talking to ask: how can we really have a conversation about this?

Ending The Embargo?

by Dish Staff

Cuba’s release of US citizen Alan Gross is being coupled with a thaw in US/Cuba relations. Both Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro are set to make public statements today:

Gross’ “humanitarian” release by Cuba was accompanied by a separate spy swap, the [senior administration officials] said. Cuba also freed a U.S. intelligence source who has been jailed in Cuba for more than 20 years, although authorities did not identify that person for security reasons. The U.S. released three Cuban intelligence agents convicted of espionage in 2001.

President Obama is also set to announce a major loosening of travel and economic restrictions in what officials called the most sweeping change in U.S. policy toward Cuba since the 1961 embargo was imposed.

Amanda Taub runs through the basics of the US-Cuba deal. Juan Cristobal Nagel is live-blogging the news. Elliott Abrams prefers the status quo:

On human rights, liberty, individual freedom there have been no changes: Cuba remains a communist dictatorship run by the Castros.

The new Republican-led Congress has a job to do here: to ask whether the President simply forgot about the Cuban people’s rights in his urge to show he isn’t just a lame duck and can still do important things. To make sure that the United States isn’t giving this vile regime a lifeline just when the old age of the Castro brothers is bringing it closer and closer to an end. To limit the benefits to Castro unless and until there are human rights improvements in Cuba.

But Phillip Peters notes that the US political climate has been changing:

As recently as 2000, Cuban Americans broke three-to-one for Republicans in Presidential elections, but no more. In 2012, exit polls showed them splitting 50-50 between President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney. Considering that the president had mildly liberalized Cuba policies in his first term and Governor Romney was calling for a return to President Bush’s hardline policies, this was a shocking result.

But it was not a fluke: it reflects changing policy preferences in a Cuban-American community increasingly populated by younger generations and more recent immigrants. A 2014 Florida International University (FIU) poll showed that for the first time since its surveys began in 1991, a majority of Cuban Americans, 52 percent, wants to end the embargo. (During the 1990s, five FIU polls showed average 85 percent support for the embargo.) Among those under age 30, 62 percent want to end the embargo and 88 percent want to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Havana.

Larison believes a shift is long overdue:

Normalizing relations with Cuba shouldn’t be seen as a “reward” for the regime. It is the removal of a barrier that has been senselessly maintained for more than five decades. If anyone is being punished by the embargo, it is the people in America and Cuba that would otherwise have productive commercial and cultural exchanges. The U.S. gains nothing by persisting in the embargo. On the contrary, it needlessly alienates Latin American governments and puts the U.S. in the absurd position of defending a Cold War relic. Normalization is twenty years overdue, and nothing will be gained by delaying it any longer.

David Graham notes Republican opposition to normalizing relations:

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whose parents were born in Cuba and moved to the United States, has opposed looser travel restrictions. Senator Ted Cruz, another Republican whose father was born in Cuba, also opposes lifting the embargo.

Earlier this month, Jeb Bush, the Republican former Florida governor who on Tuesday announced that he’s “actively exploring” a presidential bid, said, “I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it.” As proof that the embargo’s backers aren’t ready to surrender, the Miami Herald reported that “the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba’s exiled elite, applauded loudly” when Bush made that proposal. But their view looks more beleaguered than ever today.

And Morrissey wonders how this will play out politically:

This abrupt change will make Florida a very interesting place for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Cuban exile community has been firm about playing tough against the Castros, but the younger generation may be moving away from that policy. We’ll see.

How Good Are Jeb’s Chances?

by Dish Staff

How Conservative

Nate Silver and his team created “ideological scores for a set of plausible 2016 Republican candidates based on a combination of three statistical indices: DW-Nominate scores (which are based on a candidate’s voting record in Congress), CFscores (based on who donates to a candidate) and OnTheIssues.org scores (based on public statements made by the candidate)”:

Bush scores at a 37 on this scale, similar to Romney and McCain, each of whom scored a 39. He’s much more conservative than Huntsman, who rates at a 17.

Still, Bush is more like his father, George H.W. Bush, who rates as a 33, than his brother George W. Bush, who scores a 46. And the Republican Party has moved to the right since both Poppy and Dubya were elected. The average Republican member in the 2013-14 Congress rated a 51 on this scale, more in line with potential candidates Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Mike Huckabee.

So as a rough cut, Bush is not especially moderate by the standard of recent GOP nominees. But the gap has nevertheless widened between Bush and the rest of his party.

The odds Silver gives Jeb:

Betting markets put Bush’s chances of winning the Republican nomination at 20 percent to 25 percent, which seems as reasonable an estimate as any. You can get there by assuming there’s a 50 percent chance that he survives the “invisible primary” and the early-voting states intact and a 40 percent to 50 percent chance that he wins the nomination if he does. It’s a strategy that worked well enough for McCain and Romney.

But Larison argues that “some of the things that have previously been identified as Bush’s ‘strengths’ may no longer be advantages”:

Many conservatives have less patience with Bush’s corporate “centrism” now than there was ten years ago. He may not have a “Mitt Romney problem,” but he has the problem of being corporate America’s favorite candidate. The politics of immigration today is more treacherous for pro-immigration Republicans. Brian Beutler may be overstating the case when he says that Obama’s executive action on immigration has doomed Bush from the start, but he isn’t wrong that being seen as a pro-amnesty politician is a bigger problem for Bush now than it would have been just a few years ago.

Bush is often lauded for his interest in education reform, but this may end up being a serious weakness in a Republican nomination fight.

On that front, Yglesias doubts the Common Core matters:

The thought that the Common Core, of all things, would somehow derail a presidential campaign is a little odd. Federal education policy is a second-tier issue, and as Nate Silver has shown there’s no clear partisan tilt on the Common Core issue among the mass public. Lots of ordinary parents find the Common Core to be somewhat bizarre, but it’s well-supported among education experts.

And, crucially, Jeb is not some kind of ideological heretic on education policy issues. Within the relatively small world of conservative education specialists, he’s extremely well-liked. If party leaders decide that a charge against the Common Core is their #1 goal for 2017, then obviously Jeb is out of luck. But that would be a very weird thing to decide.

Robby Soave disagrees:

It’s true that Mitt Romney managed to win the nomination despite having an unpalatable former position on his election’s pivotal issue—Obamacare. But Romney managed to hedge his previous support for the program by insisting that he never would have taken it to the federal level. Bush, on the other hand, isn’t hedging his Common Core support one iota. He remains the most high-profile supporter of national education standards on the right.

Anyone who expects rank-and-file conservatives to overlook the issue is underestimating the extent of anti-Common Core sentiment among the electorate.

First Read notes that Jeb isn’t particularly popular:

According to our poll, just 31% of all voters say they could see themselves supporting him for president, while 57% say they can’t. He’s more popular among Republicans (55% support, 34% can’t support), which is the second-best GOP score in the poll behind Mitt Romney (see at the bottom). But he fares worse among Democrats (9%-79%) and, more importantly, independents (34%-52%). These numbers follow our Nov. 2014 NBC/WSJ poll, which found Bush’s fav/unfav rating at a net-negative 26%-33%. Of course, this is all subject to change. We could see how Bush — if he runs and bests his GOP competition — could improve his numbers among Republicans and some independents. Nothing can change polling numbers like success. But right now, he’s not Mr. Popular (in large part, we think, because of his last name). And it’s going to take time for him to become Jeb and not a Bush.

Francis Wilkinson asserts that “Bush appears to be demanding that the party now change to suit him”:

Unlike Christie and Romney, two guys who talk tough but shrink from confrontation with the party base, Bush seems determined to run as someone who really does call it as he sees it. It’s an admirable stance and perhaps Bush is sufficiently authentic that it’s the only one possible for him. Call it the audacity of hope. For there is no evidence that his party is eager for anything like straight talk.

Along the same lines, Nate Cohn is unsure the GOP establishment will get its way:

If top G.O.P. donors are indeed choosing between Mr. Bush, Mr. Christie and Mr. Romney, they might not have a better option than Mr. Bush.

But Mr. Bush is not a particularly strong candidate either. He may have friends in the donor class, but he hasn’t run for office in a decade, and he enters with no base of support among the G.O.P. primary electorate. He may not be lucky enough to face an opponent as flawed as Mr. Santorum or Mr. Huckabee. This year’s Republican candidates have the potential to be far stronger than in recent cycles, and if one builds momentum, the establishment’s early, anointed pick might not be able to stop him.

Melting Our Work Ethic

by Dish Staff

It’s another side-effect of global warming:

The paper, by Tatyana Deryugina of the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley, shows a fairly dramatic negative influence of heat on economic productivity. In particular, they find that, for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree C) that a given day’s 24 hour average temperature exceeds 59 degrees, economic productivity declines by 1.7 percent. And for a single very hot day — warmer than 86 degrees F — per capita income goes down by $ 20.56, or 28 percent.

The paper is penned in part as a riposte to those who have long assumed that in the United States, our economy is so advanced — and we’re so insulated by things like air conditioning — that a mere hot day can’t throw off the workforce.

Teens Are Smoking Less Pot

by Dish Staff

Teen Pot Use

Sullum relays the news:

A few months ago, I noted that the National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed no increase in marijuana use by teenagers after 2012, despite groundbreaking legalization measures approved by voters in Colorado and Washington that year. According to the latest results from the Monitoring the Future Study, released[yesterday], marijuana use by eighth-graders, 10th-graders, and 12th-graders fell this year, even as state-licensed pot shops opened in both of those states. It is too early to say whether diversion from adult buyers will increase cannabis consumption among teenagers in Colorado and Washington. But contrary to warnings from prohibitionists, legalization does not seem to be sending a message that encourages teenagers across the country to smoke pot.

German Lopez cautions that “experts say it’s far too early to know the full effects of legal pot sales”:

Mark Kleiman of UCLA and Beau Kilmer of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center cautioned on Monday that even Colorado’s first-in-the-country recreational marijuana industry is far from stable, with prices for recreational pot still higher than prices in the medical market.

“It’s going to be a while before things stabilize,” Kilmer said. Kleiman and Kilmer said they expect recreational prices to drop as more vendors and producers get into the industry, which could make excessive marijuana use more affordable and common.

How Christopher Ingraham frames the debate:

In the early 1990s the federal drug war was in full swing. But teen marijuana use spiked sharply during that period. It didn’t start falling until the late ’90s, when the first states began implementing medical marijuana laws.

This isn’t to say that repealing harsh marijuana laws will necessarily causeteen use to trend downward. But it does at the very least illustrate that it’s impossible to draw a straight line from “relaxing marijuana laws” to “increased teen use,” as [Congressman Andy] Harris and other prohibition enthusiasts do. And there are compelling arguments to be made that taking the marijuana trade off the black market, and letting government and law enforcement agencies, rather than criminals, control the marijuana market, will lead to better overall drug use outcomes among teens.

A Coal-Blooded Killer

by Dish Staff

Brian Merchant highlights a disturbing report (pdf) on India’s coal industry, which is “expected to triple by 2030”:

Today, ambient particulate matter found in pollution is already one of India’s leading killers. According to data presented by the ​Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, outdoor air pollution kills nearly 700,000 Indians a year—the next worst killer is smoking. Of that, 80,000 to 115,000 deaths are attributed to emissions from coal plants. By 2030, the toll will have risen to 186,500 to 229,500 a year.

So, by 2030, a given five year period will mean a million dead. And by then more than 42 million will have come down with asthma. The report advocates stricter emissions standards and monitoring, which could help reduce the projected tolls.

Niebuhr On Race In America

by Dish Staff

US-CRIME-POLICE-RACE-UNREST

The evangelical ethicist David Gushee pulled down Reinhold Niebuhr’s early masterpiece, Moral Man and Immoral Society, from his shelf, re-reading it with Michael Brown and Eric Garner in mind. Some background:

Written to pierce any surviving liberal optimism as the Roaring ’20s gave way to the disastrous ’30s, Niebuhr’s primary thesis concerns the effects of sin on human society and, in particular, on human collectivities or groups. Niebuhr says that all human life is marked by sin, especially in the forms of ignorance and selfishness, but at least the individual sometimes demonstrates the potential to rise above ignorance and selfishness to reach rational analysis and unselfish concern for others. Human groups, on the other hand, are both more stupid and more selfish than individuals. They seem especially impervious either to rational or moral appeal, easily prone to self-deception and demagoguery, and apparently needful of the imposition of a power greater than their own power if they are to accede to any changes that cut against their own self-interest.

Though the book focuses on economics, Gushee highlights Niebuhr’s telling comments on race: 

Niebuhr writes: “It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him, merely be trusting in the moral sense of the white race.” That’s because, as Niebuhr writes throughout, groups which benefit from the existing structure of society have no particular interest in seeing that structure changed.

Moreover, privileged groups have an extraordinary ability to “identif[y] [their] interests with the peace and order of society.” Self-deception reigns among the privileged because, among other reasons, to see reality more truly would place an unbearable moral pressure on such groups to resign privilege in favor of greater justice. Instead, privileged groups call in the forces of state power in the purported interests of the “peace and order” of society as a whole, but in fact to suppress movements of the oppressed for social change and greater justice.

Knowing that only forceful resistance to white privilege has any hope of changing the existing structures of power, Niebuhr ponders whether that pressure will be more effective if it is violent or if it is nonviolent. Niebuhr refuses to draw an absolute distinction between these forms of pressure. He does conclude that “non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors. The emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy.”

The Dish recently featured Gushee’s groundbreaking speech on the full inclusion of gay Christians in the Church here.

(Photo: A protester waves a “black and white” modified US flag during a march following the grand jury decision in the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on November 24, 2014. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)